Ashes of Heaven (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

  They were not surrendering to those who had vanquished them. Instead, these Tse-tsehese came here so that they would survive.

  Slowly, slowly now the Northern People marched toward the White Rock Agency, singing their peace songs. Before them rode Little Wolf and his headmen.

  In front of those chiefs walked the holy priest, painted in that most sacred of colors.

  But ahead of them all went the old woman carrying Esevone—that most powerful symbol of the Creator’s power and life blessing—leading Her people into seasons yet unborn.

  * * *

  When Box Elder brought his people to the Elk River fort, the old man told White Bull that the power of the Ohmeseheso had been splintered, perhaps never to be repaired again. To the four winds they had scattered, perhaps never to reunite.

  Little Wolf and Morning Star led their people south to the White River Agency.

  Big Horse and Spotted Elk had hurried along the base of the White Mountains* to rejoin their relatives among the Southern People in Indian Territory.

  A third band marched southwest, intending to settle among the Sosone-oe-o† on the Wind River Agency.

  And now the people of Two Moon, Crazy Head, and Old Crow had turned themselves over to the soldiers who promised they would teach the People to become farmers, to grow their food instead of chasing the buffalo.

  Had he done the right thing? White Bull brooded as the tempo of preparations accelerated around him. Perhaps he should have stayed out as a few of the Ohmeseheso had done, some lodges going this way, a few heading off in that.

  Yet again and again he came back to the same conclusion: it would still be no more than a matter of time before they would be captured, or killed. This enemy from the east was not only powerful in numbers, but powerful in their war medicine.

  The Bear Coat had made sure that Long Knife Rowland explained everything he wanted to say to the Shahiyela leaders. One morning the soldier chief and interpreter had taken White Bull and the others out among the white man’s spotted buffalo. Standing there in the middle of that peaceful, grazing herd, the Bear Coat explained that his soldiers were going to sell the ponies the Shahiyela had turned in, and with the money they would purchase many of these spotted buffalo for White Bull’s people. The holy man understood making a trade, but he did not understand the rest of the soldier chief’s talk about the virtues of raising these slow-witted, docile animals for meat so the warrior bands would not have to depend upon the hunt.

  Perhaps acquiring these dumb brutes was a good thing, White Bull decided. If a man of the People could not hunt the wild buffalo with a rifle from horseback, then he would have to depend upon a docile animal that never ran off, an animal that stayed close by chewing its grass contentedly, not aware of its eventual fate.

  White Bull did not want to think about his fate, about next winter. Or the following spring when the lure of the old ways would run hot in the veins of the young men. This was a hard road to walk, but walk it he would.

  Through Long Knife Rowland, the Bear Coat had explained that come warmer weather, men like White Bull could begin to tend their own garden plots at the outskirts of the fort grounds. Most of the Shahiyela had never been to the agency where the hang-abouts there planted and harvested their food.

  “Tell the Bear Coat I want to raise my favorite food,” White Bull declared that morning among the spotted buffalo.

  The soldier chief asked, “What food is your favorite?”

  “Raisins!” the holy man gushed. “I have tasted the white man’s raisins and that is the best food I have been able to find among your people—so I want to plant raisins in the ground.”

  The Bear Coat laughed with the other white men, saying, “I will do what I can to see that you grow raisins!”

  Then the soldier chief explained how the soldiers would cut at the ground with their horses and plows to prepare it for the Ohmeseheso to plant their seeds once the snows had receded and the air warmed without fear of frost.

  Ever since he had elected to stay, and had raised his arm to swear his allegiance to the Bear Coat, White Bull had enjoyed the daily performances by the soldier band. How they blew on their bright, brass horns and thumped on their rattling drums, while marching in step around the fort grounds! And after every song ended the other soldiers clapped and whistled and called out lustily, hooting for more. Naturally, White Bull learned to clap and yell at the musicians after each song too. He quickly came to like their soldier music, especially diverting during those long, cold days while he waited for his people to reach the fort.

  When they finally arrived they were issued tents and stoves, blankets and kettles. The families who had stubs of lodgepoles and scorched lodgeskins still used them, while the unmarried men put the canvas tents to good use, erecting them with the soldiers’ help, right among that crescent of poor lodges.

  But in that first, happy blush of reunion, many of the women had begun to wail and moan, asking Old Wool Woman to lead them to the grave where the soldiers had buried Crooked Nose Woman near the fort. Such sadness heaped upon sadness …

  Then two days ago an acrobatic troupe stopped for a short visit to the fort and gave two performances. How the Shahiyela laughed and laughed at their antics. It was truly amazing how those white people bounced and jumped and balanced themselves in all sorts of contorted positions! These ve-ho-e were amazing creatures.

  More than once Rowland and his tall, gray-eyed friend, who stayed at Long Knife’s elbow, showed White Bull and the other leaders complex drawings that adorned the pages of the white man’s books and magazines, some of which Long Knife explained came from far across a distant ocean, wider than any water the Shahiyela had ever seen.

  White Bull wondered how many ve-ho-e there were beyond that ocean. And why they had ever come here to this land. Why didn’t the white man just go back to where they came from so everything could return to the way it had been before?

  But he knew it could not be the way it had been before. Too much had happened. Too many were dead, and too many were orphaned and widowed.

  He would have to walk this white road. But the journey down that road would not be easy, for the Bear Coat was readying his soldiers and scouts to go after the Lakota reportedly camped on the Roseberry River.

  Now the Shahiyela were told to hunt down the Lakota. Once again, old friends would face one another on the battlefield.

  Chapter 29

  1 May 1877

  The tides of destiny wait on no man, but man must abide by the whims of fortune.

  How Seamus grinned now as Tongue River Cantonment became a blur of man and mule, bull and wagon, preparing to launch into the wilderness once more after the wildest of the holdouts.

  For the better part of half-a-year Nelson A. Miles and his Fifth Infantry had survived here on the Yellowstone without a resupply from downriver. Once the Missouri froze last fall, the Quartermaster Corps wasn’t moving a thing north to the high plains. While the men supplemented their meager diet with occasional game and fowl, their animals suffered the worst of it. What with the way winter battered this country, it was a wonder Miles and his men had been able to find any forage for the horses, mules, and the once-hardy oxen they steadfastly nursed through the winter on what scant grass they could find, as well as all the cottonwood bark the men could peel. The Fifth Infantry’s beasts sure were a gaunt, winter-poor lot, and not in the least fit for the trail.

  As much as Miles wanted to put his outfit to the hunt, it would have been plain to a blind man that his soldiers would end up killing their stock if they hurried after the Sioux.

  Then three days ago, on the twenty-eighth of April, pickets to the east began to holler shortly before noon. Not only were there riders approaching from downriver, but they were escorting the first wagon train of the season!

  Donegan yanked on his mackinaw, swilled down the last of his coffee and dashed out with the rest to lunge through the trees on foot toward the Fort Buford Road. There at the edge of the clearing
he stood watching Miles’s hardy veterans. Twice in this damnable Montana winter these doughboys had caught Sitting Bull napping, and twice they had flushed that cagey old chief into the wilds with only what his people could carry. Then they had marched up the Tongue after Crazy Horse’s camp, and given that strange man of the Lakota his last fight with the army.

  Now the soldiers stood shuffle-footed, pounding one another on the back, hallooing and hurrawing until their throats were sore and their eyes were wet with joyous tears. By God, it was a supply train from civilization!

  And who should be riding at the head of the column? Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin himself!

  “What the blazes are you doing back up here, Irishman!” the lieutenant bellowed as he drew close enough to recognize Donegan while shaking hands and saluting old comrades.

  “You say that like you didn’t expect me back, Lieutenant!”

  Baldwin smiled in that bushy two-week-old growth of his. “I didn’t. I truly didn’t. Thought you had more sense than to come north when you could be snuggled up with the missus.”

  “What? And miss your abuse, Lieutenant!” he roared as he trotted beside the officer’s horse, holding up his hand.

  They shook, and Baldwin said, “We’ll catch up tonight after mess.”

  As that weary army horse trudged on past, Seamus slowed to a halt and sang out, “What’d you bring with you in them wagons?”

  “Everything, Irishman! Everything precious to a soldier but the faces of loved ones. And forage too!”

  That announcement elicited a deafening cheer from the men who were swarming around those wagons, working loose the knots in the ropes that secured the heavy, oiled tarpaulins covering every load, anxious enough to look inside at the new supplies that many trotted alongside the train, rumbling those last three hundred yards into Tongue River Cantonment.

  Forage. Grain for their horses and mules, and those huge, horned, ribby brutes the teamsters were now backing into the single-trees with grunts and curses enough to turn the Montana air blue, harnessing the last of those bull oxen to yokes. By damn, now Miles could put to the trail, Seamus thought. Now he could be about ending what others weren’t equipped to end. Miles and the Fifth Infantry were the only ones to bring this bloody Sioux war to a close.

  So eager for the hunt had the colonel been that he gave his outfit no more than one day of unlimited grain for every last animal they would cajole south down the Tongue before climbing the divide for the Rosebud.

  The braying cacophony of mules and men was deafening, sheer excitement slathered in every hee-raw and goddammit as this army was about to embark upon the unknown. Ah, these truly were the second sweetest sounds in the world to an old horse soldier. Next to Samantha’s sigh of contentment each time he returned home to her, that is.

  “Seamus!”

  He turned now as Miles called his name.

  The colonel stopped before him, feet spread apart, his fists balled on his hips in that manner of a man immensely proud of himself. “You’ll take the supply train south, Irishman. I imagine we’ll catch up to you by the second day out.”

  “The way these oxen of yours love to lollygag, I don’t doubt that we’ll be seeing the rest of you fellas real soon!”

  Miles nodded, grinning. “Don’t lollygag yourselves. Keep them moving from first light till it’s time to go into camp for the night. I’m sending you because you’re the sort of man who can find those teamsters a safe camp in enemy country.”

  “I’ll mother ’em like they was me own kin, General!”

  “Be off with you then!” Miles stuck out his bare hand even though the day was blustery and about as raw as a Montana spring day could be.

  Miles and his officers had decided to send the slow-moving supply train off first, using the best of the mules and oxen that had come upriver with Baldwin, all the way west from Fort Abraham Lincoln and the depot at Bismarck. From what the arriving bands had explained, the enemy Miles sought wasn’t that far away—no more than a matter of a few days. But to make a victory of this strike at the holdouts, the command would need this bull-train.

  And Seamus Donegan was the man to see that the teamsters and Lieutenant Cornelius Cusick’s F Company, Twenty-second Infantry, escorted the balky oxen and mules upriver as far as they could before Miles and the rest could catch up to them. Once they rejoined, it would be an overland chase, cross-country after the last of the hostiles refusing to surrender, refusing to be driven in to their agencies, celebrating this last season of freedom.

  Swinging into the saddle, he adjusted the reins in his left glove, then saluted Miles, Baldwin, and the others who took off their hats and hollered as the Irishman gave his mount the heel and set off at a prance. Behind him the civilian teamsters growled their own princely commands and cracked the air with their twenty-foot black silk whips, each one snapping like a cottonwood popping in the depths of a winter night.

  South. Up the Tongue. Alone with but one company of soldiers and these hardy teamsters, going in search of the very same Sioux warriors who had stymied Crook at the Rosebud, butchered Custer on the Little Bighorn, then disappeared like smoke on the wind as autumn descended upon the Little Missouri country.*

  He had no idea why, but something stuck down in his craw told Seamus that these holdouts the army was stalking were likely to be the toughest of them all.

  BY TELEGRAPH

  ILLINOIS.

  Crook on the Indians.

  CHICAGO, May 2.—The Post has an interview with General Crook concerning the Indian question, the substance of which is that General Crook considers the Indians are like white men in respect to acquisitiveness; that if they are given a start in the way of lands, cattle and agricultural implements, they will keep adding to their wealth and settle down into respectable, staid citizens.

  “You should have let me kill him, Uncle!”

  Lame Deer saw the fury in his nephew’s eyes, the flush it brought to Iron Star’s cheeks. “Perhaps.”

  “I could have gone after him,” Iron Star snarled, “if you didn’t want me to shed his blood in our camp.”

  The Mnikowoju chief gazed at the army revolver clutched in his nephew’s hand. If he had the half-breed here right now, he wouldn’t mind spilling that turncoat’s blood himself. But regrettably, the one called Big Leggings was gone. Many days ago the half-breed had turned to the north, leaving their camp of Lakota and Shahiyela, returning to the soldier post on Elk River.

  Big Leggings had shown himself at the crest of a nearby hill, bearing a white cloth knotted to the end of a long, bare limb. There the half-breed stayed atop his horse close enough to be seen and perhaps to make sign, but far enough that he had a good lead on any young warrior who might attempt to run him down for a coup, a scalp, and the half-breed’s army weapons. Big Leggings remained watchful and nervous until Lame Deer and some of the other headmen walked out under their own white flag and invited him off the hill.

  The Lakota were a people of honor—and the half-breed knew that If they accepted the courier into their camp under the white flag, no harm must come to the man. There were times Lame Deer stood aghast at the complete insanity of an honorable people fighting this terrible war against an enemy who had no honor. An enemy who reaped destruction upon the villages of women and children. An enemy who refused to live up to his own promises.

  Who would be rash enough to fault Lame Deer if he had indeed slaughtered Big Leggings while they parleyed in his lodge? Especially since this half-breed enemy was himself a man without honor …

  This war with the wasicu had stirred up so many questions in Lame Deer’s heart, questions truly without answers, matters that troubled and vexed this leader who wanted only to be left alone to hunt and live free on that land given to Red Cloud and the other chiefs almost ten summers ago, when Lame Deer was still only a warrior. Now the soldiers were taking back their word, brutally driving the Indians off that land, butchering all who resisted. Perhaps there really was no honorable war with such an e
nemy.

  Iron Star might be right, Lame Deer thought.

  To fight such an evil enemy a man had to make use of every ploy at his disposal. Every trick and ruse he had learned in all those years of raiding the Psatoka, those People of the Big-Beaked Bird,* the Susuni,† and others. To survive in this life and death struggle against an enemy without conscience, Lame Deer figured he might well have to set aside this matter of honor unto death.

  If he were going to protect the many who had flocked to him once Spotted Tail tried to convince the Crazy Horse people to come south with him, in all those days since the big village broke, clan torn from clan, Lakota drifting off to the four winds to unite no more as they had in that summer of their greatness … he might have to put survival before honor.

  In recent days Lame Deer’s wandering village had more than doubled in size. Encompassing sixty lodges now, with some brush arbors for those unattached young warriors who no longer lived with their families, even some whose families had decided they would go south to the agencies, while they themselves would stay on in the north country and fight to the end.

  When the Crazy Horse village broke up, the Mnikowoju and Sans Arc bands set off for the familiar country between the Little Missouri and the sacred Bear Butte. It was there Spotted Tail reached them, convincing most to start south. From there Spotted Tail and his entourage marched west, determined to find the camp of his nephew, Crazy Horse. So while the rest of the chiefs and their bands reluctantly set off for the reservation, Lame Deer made for the Powder with fewer than thirty lodges.

  From the Powder they journeyed on to the upper waters of the Buffalo Tongue where a few more warriors brought in their families along with some young men eager to continue to live the old life. Near the mouth of Hanging Woman Creek here in the Pehingnunipi Wi, the Moon of Shedding Ponies, the Shahiyela had reached them—White Hawk and his fifteen lodges.